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people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
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George Orwell’s vision portrayed in 1984 contrasts with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Rather than being overcome by an eternally imposed oppression, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think. The first feared banning books, while the second thought there would be no reason to ban books because nobody would read them. Orwell feared we could be deprived of information; Huxley feared we would be given so much we could be reduced to passivity and egoism. The truth to be concealed from us would transform into truth concealed in a sea of irrelevance. Rather than a captive culture, we would become a trivial culture.
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The city of Las Vegas embodies so well the character and aspiration of the U.S., with its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. Las Vegas is a city entirely dedicated to the idea of entertainment, and as such, it proclaims that all public discourse increasingly takes this form.
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America has become a show-business country, where your entertainment presence counts for more than your knowledge or expertise. For those asking what has led to this, some suspect it to be the residue of exhausted capitalism, or the neurotic aftermath of the age of Freud, or the effect of the death of God, or that it all comes from standard greed and ambition.
A formulation made by Plato over 2,300 years ago suggests that the how of human conversation influences the what, and this, in turn, influences the ideas we can express. The ideas we can express inevitably become the important content of culture.
Our attention here is on how forms of public discourse (medium) regulate what kind of content (ideas) we formulate.
Let’s consider ancient smoke signals, an ancient medium of communication. While we do not fully understand the content this communication carried, we can safely presume it wasn’t philosophy. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.
In today’s world, the shape of a man’s body is irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing the public in writing, on radio, or through smoke signals, for that matter. However, it does become quite relevant when speaking of television. A three-hundred-pound man would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual arguments. Television gives us a conversation in images, not words.
The emergence of the image-manager dictates that television or any other screen media demands a different kind of content. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.
On another level, even the “stuff” that fills the news and media would not exist in a world that lacked the medium to give it expression. Such news would not exist in the lives of people, it would not fill their days or the content of their culture.
The idea of a “news of the day” was created entirely by the telegraph and is now amplified by newer media, which made it possible to move decontextualized information over vast spaces at incredible speed. The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination. It’s a media event.
To say it plainly, this book is an inquiry into the most significant American cultural fact of the second half of the twentieth century: the decline of typography and the ascendancy of the age of television. This changeover has dramatically shifted the landscape of ideas, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas.
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As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else needs to adapt to a new medium, and therefore to a new message. As they famously say, the medium is the message, which commands us to think: What does this say about our medium and our message in today’s society?
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